


A Normal Life

by orelseatlastsheunderstoodit



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Original Character(s), Time War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2017-07-28
Packaged: 2018-07-29 21:43:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 19,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7700827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orelseatlastsheunderstoodit/pseuds/orelseatlastsheunderstoodit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A young woman has an extraordinary sense of time, and has used it to protect her village from the ravages of the war sweeping the universe. But then a Time Lady--and the war--come to her village anyway, and she is swept up into the wider war between the Time Lords and the Daleks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The MalRisse

Beni was not destined for a normal life.

That was what her parents had told her many times, anyway. Mother had said it soothingly to her when a much-younger Beni had been terrified of the nightmares which had pulled her screaming from her sleep. Father had said it with a subdued pride when speaking with the village elders. The people had whispered it when the whole village had been huddled in the tunnels, once the terrors her dreams had warned them of had rolled past.

Of course, it wasn’t destiny, not scientifically speaking. Beni had studied what she could scour from the town’s library, from its linkup with the global web. She’d worked out the measurements and pored over the charts and came to her own conclusions before she was eleven. She had told no one, though, as they seemed to have their reasons for not telling her that the MalRisse had appeared at the same moment she had been born. 

The MalRisse was an unexplained phenomenon, which hung (as far as could be determined) above her village, a set of four identical jagged lines, much like crooked grimaces that echoed one another. Government folks had measured it, the reports said, and had not discovered much except that the MalRisse was geosynchronous with that spot above the village, invisibly and unexplainably tethered to the place.

Once the adults had decided she was mature enough to handle their speculations (thirteen, though she’d had a handle on the nightmares for years prior), they had confirmed her suspicions. Her gifts, they said, were probably a result of the MalRisse—it wasn’t something they could prove, but they believed it all the same. 

Mother spoke of when she had been an infant, that she'd cry when they were in danger, that there were some close escapes early on from when they'd originally thought it was colic and not fear. "All babies can sense danger," Mother had said, "but you, my daughter, my darling Benison, were different. You are gifted to hear and to see what we cannot."

Beni had shouldered her growing sense of responsibility, of protectiveness, as well as she could have. But it was hard and it was lonely. No one in the village understood what it was like, to wake screaming, from dreams of fire and darkness, of creatures from beyond the stars drenched in blood and fire and moonlight, of shadows thrown by monsters with harsh syllabic voices. From dreams where her friends and family were erased, sent screaming into the void.

No one understood how jarring it was to look at someone and see the craze of lines their lives had taken | were taking | would take (it reminded her of Father’s pottery, of how the glaze would crack when cooled too quickly). To see the knots of where they should have died but hadn’t due to them heeding her warnings (it reminded her of the fishermen’s nets after a good catch of struggling fish). To see the faces of people blur as they took on characteristics from futures or pasts. To see where everyone’s lines suddenly and sharply cut off regardless of possible paths. 

No one understood how hard she had struggled to find who she was in the midst of everyone else’s paths, in the middle of everyone else’s desperate expectations, full of a knowledge she couldn't always share and sometimes could not even comprehend. How hard-won her sense of self and her sanity actually was. 

She suspected that her parents were the closest to that knowledge, seeing as they had been witness to her screamings, her tears, the times she had babbled out her dreams insensible to the rest of the world, her rants against the unfairness of it all. They had supported her and loved her and kept her as safe as they could. Beni could say with certainty that they were good parents and would have been so in any iteration of their lives (though in other lines she had had siblings, people who never had been and never would be and yet somehow their faces still swam in her memories).

To see and hear as she did meant having either no sense of self or a strong sense of self. And she had fought her way to the latter.

Beni didn’t know why her people honored her for merely prolonging the inevitable, though she believed that life was precious and worth saving. She loved her family and she loved her people and she loved her village and did her best, which was all they wanted from her. They acknowledged that she hadn’t chosen to plagued by nightmares but were grateful all the same. She’d kept them safe, but Beni knew that someday—some day soon—her abilities would not be enough to do so.

One day, a ship landed on the edge of the village. Beni saw its silver cylindrical shape melt and shift into one of the village’s sentinel trees. The not-tree shivered and shimmered with the glaze of time, and a figure stepped out of it. 

Beni had seen the not-tree in her nightmares, but not this stranger. Somehow Beni knew that the some day soon was sooner than she’d been expecting, that this stranger’s arrival was the tendrils of doom.

No, Beni was not destined for a normal life.

Beni wanted to have some carefully chosen words, twenty-five years' worth of carefully chosen words, with destiny.


	2. The Stranger

The stranger strode into the village, past the villagers who gathered in their doorways, past the library and the little shops and where Father and Mother lived. The stranger strode past everything as if it were irrelevant, as if it were beneath them, as if it could dismissed with a glance, headed straight toward where Beni lived. Of course, someone whose ship could pretend to be a tree would be able to see the crazed surface of the village’s existence and know about her.

Beni had a feeling that she and this stranger would not get along.

The stranger was wearing armor, the color of blood and bruises, with swirly gold insignia. Beni could see no weapons but did not doubt that such a creature might have weapons she couldn’t recognize.

“You are Benison Zuflucht,” the stranger said, brusque, business-like. 

The stranger’s face was far more blurred than any face Beni had ever seen—as if the same being had worn several different faces and had different lives and would have several more. She squinted—who was the stranger at present?

The faces coalesced around a woman with angular features and deftly applied eyeliner, who was eyeing Beni with something that seemed to approach amusement. 

“The polite thing to do would have been to ask to enter before passing the sentinels,” Beni said. “But, barring that, your name would do.”

The strange woman huffed a sigh, as if such customs were a waste of time. Perhaps it was beneath a creature that dealt in blood and fire. If so, it would not hurt for such a creature to learn a lesson in courtesy.

"I seek forgiveness for entering unasked," the person said, in a tone that belied impatience, "and, as for introductions, you should know who I am if you are Zuflucht.”

“I have seen your ship turn into a tree before,” Beni said, choosing her words carefully as her people gathered. They were silent, listening, watching. “But until today I have never seen you. Yet, if you know who I am and why I am the person I am, you would know that I will not leave.”

“I am a Time Lady of Gallifrey. You may call me Commander Kelsoc,” the strange woman said. “I expect you may have heard of us.”

Oh, yes. The war. It raged between the Gallifreyans and their bitterest enemies, the Daleks, the owners of the syllabic voices which had rolled and rasped their ways through her nightmares. “Who hasn’t at this point?” Beni said, waving a hand dismissively. “You should leave.”

“We know what you have done for your people,” Kelsoc said, ignoring what Beni had said. “What you do. And you are in danger, for the Daleks also know.”

“And you have come to warn me?”

“No. For your people’s safety, you will need to come with me.”

“No!” Elder Strinreth hobbled forward, pointing his cane at Kelsoc. “You cannot take Benison from us! She has protected us since she was small; she was gifted—“

“Her abilities are an incidental side effect of the Battle of Tau Sigma Five and the resulting temporal-spatial rifts. It is these rifts that protect you, not this woman.”

“Then why take me?” Beni asked. 

Kelsoc’s eyes narrowed. Beni suspected that she hadn’t expected to be resisted. “Your village has less than five years, give or take,” Kelsoc said, almost as if she were bored. “The Daleks will attack it in order to get you. There is a chance, however minuscule, that they will not if you are not here.”

Elder Strinreth leaned toward Beni. “Is this outsider correct?” he asked. “Does she speak potential truth?”

“You know I will not lie to you, Elder,” Beni said. Strinreth had never been meant to lean on a cane, to see his grandchildren growing up around him, but here he was, alive and whole. Images of all the times he had been supposed to die danced in front of her vision, and she felt sick. 

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and let it out. An image of Kelsoc standing where the Time Lady now stood, surrounded by burning trees save one, washed uninvited across her mind. She opened her eyes again. “The Evil Ones will come regardless of my presence here, I believe.”

“We are not evil, Benison,” Kelsoc said. 

“I would think that the term is subjective when it comes to Gallifreyans,” Beni said. “I have watched over my village since I was a child, and I will not leave it.”

“If you do not leave, they will die.”

“If I leave, they will die. Yet, do we not all eventually die, outsider of Gallifrey? Even you. Your time will come to an end. You will be erased--" Beni paused, bit her bottom lip. What would this stranger do if she heard of that?

Kelsoc gave a nod. "We have seen what you're about to speak of. But that is not why I am here. I am here because the enemy has discovered you and your village and the role you will play in the coming battle. They will take you and try to use you in the war."

“Is that not what you are doing?” Father asked, the clay nearly dry on his hands. “Trying to take Benison for your own purposes?”

"I have the authority of the Time Lord High Council to take you with me," Kelsoc said, her voice faltering slightly as she looked around at the villagers who were now whispering to each other. She squared her shoulders. “Benison will come with me."

Beni had already said she would not leave. She wouldn’t say it again. She simply kept quietly looking at Kelsoc.

"We do not want her to leave," Riel, the baker, said as she shifted her grip on her infant. "Who is your High Council to us?" The other villagers echoed her, all shouting at the Time Lady, faces angry. 

Strinreth's cane poked at the Time Lady's armor. "She is part of this community," he said. "She belongs here. You do not. You cannot tell us what to do."

"Do you not understand that you will die if you harbor her here?" 

"Because of her I have lived longer than I ever would have. We all owe our lives to her," Strinreth said, poking again at Kelsoc's armor. "She has kept us alive again and again. Your people did not do that. Your people do not care to do that. You care for nothing but yourselves. We want you to leave. Now."

"I will not argue with lower lifeforms," Kelsoc said, holding her hands up in a placating gesture. She seemed unaware that 'lower lifeforms' was an insult. "And thus I will acquiesce to your request for my departure." She spun on her heel and marched back to her tree and it swiftly disappeared.


	3. The Daleks

Beni stared hard at where the not-tree had been. She knew that Kelsoc’s acquiescence was not the end of the argument. The lines were clear, now, clearer than they had been her entire life. She reached up to wipe unbidden tears out of her eyes.

Father laid a hand on her shoulder. “Beni, what is wrong?” His eyes were full of concern for her, as they seemingly had been all of her life.

“Oh, Father,” she said, not entirely trusting her voice not to crack, then stopped, remembered that she was surrounded by the village. Beni dropped her head and stared at her feet. How could she tell them? She couldn't lie to them. She didn't want to. But she didn't want to tell them, either. Oh, how she hated the MalRisse. What did it mean to be alive now if it meant being dead in the future? Was a brief time alive (spent in fear and pain) better than never having existed? She didn't know; what she did know is that she preferred being alive.

“Please tell us, Benison,” Strinreth said. 

“Even if it’s bad news,” Riel said.

Father’s arm tightened around her shoulders.

Beni took a deep breath. “As you ask,” she said, feeling more and more nauseated as she spoke. “The Evil Ones will come here, within the timespan the stranger stated. But that's nothing different than what I've seen my entire life. There is no hope with the Time Lords and Ladies of Gallifrey, and there is no hope with the Daleks. The village will burn and we will die. Unless--"

"Unless what?" Riel asked, handing her infant to her wife. "Is there anything we can do?"

The image of a creature in a weary leather jacket and a worn face flashed across Beni’s mind. “No, there is not, except that which we've been doing. We stay quiet, we hide, we stay away from the monsters."

“So there is no hope?” Riel asked.

Beni tried not to cry. She would not cry. "I wish the dreams were different,” she said. “I wish I could give good news and give us hope. But the pots are broken and I cannot see how hope remains."

"It is enough." Strinreth put a hand on her shoulder. "It is enough. You have saved us time and again, and if we die, it is not your fault."

Oh, she cried then, to be loved and understood and forgiven for her coming failures anyway.

A few months after the Gallifreyan’s departure, Beni’s nightmares worsened. The Daleks were coming but she would not run. They would only give chase, make it worse for those she loved.

And when she told the village to flee what was coming, they chose not to leave. 

This baffled her. "They will kill you," she said. Their skeletons would glow with the Daleks' death-light and her life's efforts would vanish like smoke.

"We will not leave you alone," they told her, and that was that. There was no arguing with them, and part of her was glad that they would not abandon her.

The Daleks came, as Kelsoc had said, as Beni had seen.

They rained fire down on the houses, driving people into the village center, where they rasped out ‘Exterminate' and proceeded to their work.

Beni watched as her people fell around her, powerless to do anything this time to stop them from dying. They screamed and they died and she could do nothing but watch and witness their deaths. She did nothing to stop the tears that silently rolled down her cheeks.

The Daleks landed in a rough circle around her. “The seer has been captured,” their leader enunciated. “She will come with us.”

“She will not,” Beni said. 

“You will come with us or you will die,” the lead Dalek said, its comrades echoing, “Come with us”. It moved its whisk-like weapon to point at Beni.

“Kill me, then,” Beni answered.

And then something odd happened.


	4. The Unwelcome Rescue

Something fuzzy and gray fizzled into place between the Daleks and herself. It steadily grew more solid until she could no longer see the Daleks. She felt rooted to the spot she stood—she wasn’t dead as she’d expected to be, in some last tribute to her people, but where she was now, she did not know. It was a sparse, clean white room, with round things on the walls. It positively hummed with time. 

“I told you that they wanted you for the war,” a voice behind her said. “And I was correct in that statement.”

Beni spun. The Gallifreyan Kelsoc stood at what was clearly a console, the surface of which was all studded with buttons and levers, its lit center smoothly sliding up and down. Ah, so she was inside the not-tree, inside the Gallifreyan’s time-space-ship.

“What are you doing?” Beni cried, swiping at her face with one wide sleeve. “Take me back!”

“The Daleks would not have killed you,” Kelsoc said. “Not right away, and not in the manner you were clearly courting. There is nothing left to take you back to.”

“You couldn’t have protected the whole village before the Daleks came?” Beni said.

“Of course not. We could not show the Daleks that we knew of their plans—it would have given them an advantage we could ill afford.”

Beni could hardly describe how she felt, a mixture of cold fury and hot grief and simmering disgust and a tremulous fear. “You speak as if the destruction of my village was a foregone conclusion, as if they were just pieces in your great war.”

“Were they not? Did you not see their determined destructions regardless of your efforts? Surely you know, have always known that your efforts were futile.”

“They were my efforts to give.” Beni could feel her hands shaking, though she didn’t know if it was from which emotion. After all, to put it mildly, today had been a bad day. “Take me back to my village so I can die with them.”

“As I have said, they would not have killed you. Rather, they would have compelled you to accompany them to their ship. Stop imagining that you would have had some noble last stand amongst the Daleks—hardly anyone ever does.”

Beni took a step toward the Gallifreyan. “I spent my life with my people; I should not abandon them even now. Take me back.”

Kelsoc sighed and spun one of the dials on her console. “We are not having this conversation,” she stated. “In the end you could not protect them. Having you gave them hope. A foolish sentiment, really, best wasted on the Doctor and on lower lifeforms—“

“I am not a lower lifeform and neither were my family or friends!” Beni felt the words explode out of her. She grabbed onto the console as the ship rocked to one side. It hummed happily underneath her fingertips. “We are just as important as you lot and a whole deal less self-important. Your war has shaped my life from its beginning—your ‘incidental side effect’ saw to that. You and the Daleks have both brought darkness and danger and death into the universe. You fight a war with no beginning and no end. A war that will result in the utter extermination of all unless something changes. And guess what? We ‘lower lifeforms’ are sick of your endless war. We are sick of Time Ladies and Daleks and your temporal-spatial squabbles.”

“The Daleks killed your people. This is now your war, too.”

“Because your people did nothing to help mine.”

“It was not expedient to do so,” Kelsoc said. “We are going to my planet in the hopes that you can help us end this war. You have no other options.”

Beni smiled then. “We will always have other options. I wonder what all these controls do,” she said, running her hands across the panel of buttons closest to her. She ran around the console, pulling levers, smashing her hands against keys, Kelsoc chasing after her. The ship wheezed and lurched. It was clearly unhappy.

“What are you doing?” Kelsoc shouted. She slammed levers back into their original positions, slid levers back into place, as she followed after Beni. “We’ll crash!”

“So be it!”

The ship thumped to a stop. Kelsoc caught up to Beni, shoved her away from the console. Beni stumbled backward and landed hard on her rear. Sharp twinges ran up her arms. Hopefully she was not seriously hurt.

“Where are we,” Kelsoc muttered. She pulled down a monitor and stared into it. Seeing something in the swirling circles, she glanced at Beni. “We’re not too far off course,” Kelsoc said. She pointed at Beni. “You will not touch the console. You will not argue. And when we arrive, you will clean yourself up. And then you will help us against the Daleks.”

Beni imagined she smelled of charred dreams and crumbled hopes. That, or woodsmoke from her burning village. She still had clay underneath her fingernails from clutching her dead father’s hands and knew she was streaked with sweat and soot and dried tears. So a chance to get clean wouldn’t be unwelcome. Although she entertained the idea of staying dirty, as she guessed it would bother the Gallifreyan.

She rubbed one of her now-sore hands and stayed where she was seated. The ship vibrated beneath her, but whether it was communicating anger or sorrow she didn’t know. Beni hadn’t meant to hurt the ship but had only wanted to communicate something of the almost wild despair she was now feeling to the unfeeling Gallifreyan. She did have options, even if the Gallifreyan disparaged them. Even if everything seemed hopeless at present. She hoped the ship knew that.

“You said we had less than five years, but it was less than five months,” Beni said. “But what is five years to you? To me, it was the lifespan of my cousin Ean. It was the length of Dee and Rev’s marriage. It was the number of times Elder Strinreth should have died but did not. But what is five years, to someone like you? To someone who walks in time as my people walked in our woods? What is five years to someone who was there when the mighty sentinel tree was a seed and when it was a sapling and when it was grown and now when it has burned? I will not help you.”

“We fight this war on the behalf of others,” Kelsoc said, turning back to the console. “Yourself included. Not just ourselves, as you seem to think. I don’t expect you to believe me, however. I am sure we have ways of persuading you.”

Beni knew she was not imagining the not-so-subtle threat underlying Kelsoc’s words. “I’m sure you do.”


	5. The Arrival

After that, Beni did not say much. The pain in her hands slowly grew, but Kelsoc paid her no mind except to remind her not to touch the console. The ship seemed sympathetic to Beni, whirring softly to her as she sat near the ship’s door. But Kelsoc was also not paying attention to her ship, either, at least not in matters of emotion.

What would Beni do when they arrived on the home of the Gallifreyans? She had to admit to herself that she was not at all sure of what would happen—their planet was shrouded, buttressed somehow against the vagaries of time, and beyond the fact that she could see it both burning and freezing by turns, she did not know what would happen there. And she didn’t know what would happen to her—her own lines had multiplied far beyond what she had ever seen. She simply did not know what would happen to her now, or what she would do in response.

To be without knowledge could be just as terrible, just as frightening, Beni decided, as having it.

The center console stopped sliding up and down, and the low thrum that had filled the empty spaces in the ship ceased. A shudder of fear (and, if she were honest, some excitement) ran through Beni.

“We’re here,” Kelsoc said. She was a commander, all right. Commander of the obvious. She crossed the space between the console and the door, grabbed Beni’s shoulder and pulled her to her feet. “You will follow me,” she said, her fingers tight on Beni’s upper arm. “You will not—“

“Argue. You sound like a skipping holodisc,” Beni said. “Granted, you probably don’t know what holodiscs are, seeing as you lot probably have no fun—“

“I know what a holodisc is,” Kelsoc said tightly. “Our first stop is where you can make yourself as presentable as possible.” Her tone implied that Beni’s potential level of presentable-ness wasn’t very high. Beni restrained herself from rolling her eyes. “And then we will get to work.”

“You’ll be waiting a long time before I help you,” Beni said. “I certainly hope you’re a patient person.”

Kelsoc’s eyes glinted. “I’m quite certain I can outlast you.”

At that moment she let go of Beni’s arm. Beni followed the Gallifreyan out of the ship into what was clearly a dock for such ships, with empty spaces on either side of the ship they’d just left. A stone roof curved above them, pitted with age. The air smelled funny to Beni, faintly metallic, as if it had been scrubbed too hard. Did Gallifreyans usually breathe recycled air? Why would they do that?

One thing was certain, however: Gallifrey was years and years ahead of Beni’s planet when it came to technology. She could tell this from everything she saw—everything seemed highly mechanized, highly regimented. There was probably governmental bloat and everything her textbooks had mentioned about old empires. Probably no one here had gotten caught in a summer rainstorm, or stood barefoot on a pile of hail after a storm had passed. Probably no one here had gotten muddy feet (or boots, even). Probably no one here had caught snowflakes on their tongues or stuck their arms elbow-deep in a bucket of liquid clay. Probably they thought it was beneath them. If she weren’t so furious with them, she’d pity them.

Occasionally she noticed people staring at her as they walked along, but Kelsoc hurried her along. All the stories implied that the Gallifreyans were highly xenophobic; Beni was keenly aware that it was only her abilities that had her trailing after the imperious armored woman. And perhaps these people were not used to seeing someone as dirty as her—well, it would probably do them some good to get outside for once.

And maybe they simply weren’t aware of the wider war. Maybe the Gallifreyans had a spectacular propaganda machine running, she didn’t know.

Kelsoc pulled her to a stop outside a door. She jabbed a thumb towards it. “In there,” she said. “You’ll probably want the water option. There should be something suitable for you to wear.”

“What, I get an option? I thought you said I didn’t have any options,” Beni said, ducking into the room before Kelsoc could reply.

Once inside, alone for the first time since the death of her village, Beni could feel the grief that threatened to overwhelm her. She couldn’t do that. Not at present, anyway. The room itself didn’t appear to allow any opportunities for escape. (And how would she leave? She didn’t know how to pilot the Gallifreyan’s ship, friendly enough as it was.) In fact, the room was probably a cell of sorts. Sparsely furnished with a bunk, a chest of drawers, a chair, and a connected washroom. With a locking door, in fact, which pleased Beni more than she felt it probably should.

Cleaning up felt good, though her hands were more clumsy than normal. They still hurt, too, now that the adrenaline of her encounter with the Daleks and the subsequent shouting match with Kelsoc was bleeding off, though the warm water had felt good on them. Could she have hurt them badly when she had landed on the ship’s floor? Beni found clean clothes—trousers and a loose-fitting shirt with flowing sleeves, light boots—to wear, though she was loathe to leave her last piece of home crumpled on the floor. 

Then Beni dragged the chair into the washroom, turned on the water option (and how had Kelsoc somehow made that option sound vulgar?) without getting into the shower itself, and locked the door. She jammed the chair under the door knob and sat on the chair. Time to see how much patience the Time Lady actually had.


	6. The Lady President

Turned out that Kelsoc’s patience didn’t stretch very far.

Beni had listened to her pound on the door to the cell, then enter it. Clearly finding Beni’s absence unsatisfactory, she pounded on the washroom’s door. “What are you doing in there?”

“Making myself presentable,” Beni called. “It’s taking longer than expected.”

“Hurry up, we do not have the—“

“Time? Were you about to say ‘time’? Don’t you have plenty of that?” When so many people have so little of it? Beni allowed herself a grin. While she saw no probable way this would end well for herself, it was gratifying to hear Kelsoc so agitatedly spluttering.

The door rattled. “Why won’t this door open?”

“Maybe it’s tired of being a door and wants to be a wall,” Beni said.

“Maybe you should unlock the door.”

“But I’m making myself presentable,” Beni said again, watching the water fall into the tub. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“I have no doubt that you are as presentable as you can probably be,” Kelsoc said. “Come out.”

“No.”

“Are you refusing to come out of the washroom?”

“Is that not what I said?”

Beni could hear the frustration in the huffed sigh that followed. “Why are you humans so. . .so . . .uncivilized?”

“We clearly have different definitions of ‘civilized’ than Gallifreyans,” Beni replied. 

The chair shifted forward a fraction. Had Kelsoc rammed her shoulder into the door? “Are you blocking the door?”

No way to answer that one to the Time Lady’s satisfaction, so Beni stayed quiet and scooted the chair back toward the door.

“I swear, I will break that door down and you will not like—“

Another voice made Kelsoc stop speaking: “Commander, are you threatening a door?”

Beni snickered. At the very least, the owner of this voice had a sense of humor. Unless Gallifreyan doors were like Gallifreyan ships, and if so, she was sorry if she had distressed the door. Still, she’d rather have it between her and Kelsoc.

“What? No, ma’am, there is a vital asset to the war effort on the other side of the door and I cannot get it to come out.”

“A vital asset? Why haven’t you reported in to the Council? And why is it locked into a washroom?”

“The asset is a human, ma’am, and she needed to be prese—“

“Please do not finish that sentence, Commander.” Her tone made it clear that it was not a request. A light knock on the door behind Beni. “May I have your name?” the woman asked, her tone softened from her previous sentence.

“Benison Zuflucht,” Beni replied.

“I see. Benison, is it possible for you to unlock the door? I like to see the people I’m talking to.”

Was it a trick? Get someone to play nice so that Kelsoc could swoop in like a hawk and hurt her again? She couldn’t risk it. “Only if Kelsoc isn’t there.”

“By all the—“ Kelsoc started. Beni could just imagine the indignation on the Time Lady’s face. “We don’t have time to play nice with a primitive.”

“Commander Kelsoc, kindly remember who you’re speaking to,” the woman said. “Please step into the hall and wait there.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kelsoc said, clearly unhappy. Beni didn’t feel sorry for her at all. The cell door slammed. 

Beni slid off the chair and turned off the water. Her hands really hurt now, and she was in no mood to cooperate more than necessary. She pulled the chair away from the door and unclicked the lock. “You can open the door,” she said. 

The door swung in and revealed another Time Lady. This one was in robes, however, and her faces were more frayed on the edges as if she had traveled more than Kelsoc had in time. The faces coalesced around a dark-haired, sharp-eyed woman, who looked weary but kinder than any other Gallifreyan she’d seen so far. “I take it that Commander Kelsoc was less than kind in retrieving you,” she said. 

Anyone with a modicum of sense could figure that out, but Beni gave a slight nod. She tentatively trusted the woman, but didn’t want to go into details. “I’m afraid my hands might be badly hurt.”

“Hmm,” the woman said. “Well, step on out here and we’ll have a look at them.”

Beni stepped out into the room and held out her hands. The woman studied them for a moment, then lifted her eyes to meet Beni’s. “Would you like some tea?”

“Tea?”

“Yes. Hot drink. Good for the synapses, a friend of mine says.”

“I know what tea is. I don’t know why you’re offering it to me.”

“Ah. Well, I do want to call a physician better versed in human anatomy in to look at your hands,” the woman said. “But it will be a little while before he arrives, particularly as I have not yet sent the message for him to know when to arrive. And I suppose that you haven’t had the best of days.”

“To put it mildly.”

“In that case, tea and something to eat and a chat is in order.”

“And Kelsoc?”

The woman studied her carefully. Beni got the feeling she saw more than she revealed. “The commander has other duties she can attend to while we wait.” She swept her way to the cell’s door and opened it. “Commander, please attend to your ship and the reports that you have surely neglected in your haste to present your vital asset to the Council. I will take responsibility for Miss Zuflucht’s conduct.”

“But, Lady President, ma’am, surely you have more important things to do than fuss over some primitive.”

Lady President? How important was this Time Lady? Clearly Kelsoc deferred to her but—

“Commander Kelsoc, I believe you were given an order. I expect it to be followed.”

The commander gave a sharp nod, saluted, and then spun on her heel and stalked away. Beni let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding in. It was if she’d been pinned underneath something heavy and it had been suddenly removed.

The Lady President glanced back at Beni and gave her a prim smile. “Now, if you’ll follow me,” she said, heading down the corridor.

Beni followed.


	7. Time for Tea

Beni knew that she’d been stared at while walking with Kelsoc, but that was nothing like while walking with this Time Lady. People openly gawked and whispered, but the Lady President paid them no mind. She merely motioned for Beni to keep up. Either they didn’t see her often, or they didn’t see her with humans, or it was somehow scandalous for the Lady President to be with humans. If she had grown up gambling, Beni would have put money on the last option. Nothing she’d seen so far would endear the Gallifreyans to her.

They stopped outside a plain door, which the Lady President unlocked with a key, and they entered the room behind the door. Inside were guards, who looked surprised. The Lady President waved them off and they retreated to the edges of the room. She invited Beni to take a seat, rang for tea, and sent a message (though Beni didn’t understand the mechanism by which she sent it). After the tea arrived and was poured for both of them, she turned to Beni.

“Is your time sense as well-developed as we believe?” she asked.

Her kindness was not without an agenda. Beni had not believed it wouldn’t; politicians did not last long without having some sort of agenda. As long as this woman did not speak of forcing her to help their war effort, she would answer. The cup Beni held warmed her sore hands and eased the ache a bit. She took a sip, swallowed. “If by ’time sense’ you mean—“

“I mean, do you have the ability to see the various strings of Time?” She took a sip, set the cup onto her desk. “Our reports indicate that you have a very well-developed time sense, one that helped protect your village for quite some time.”

“My parents and the elders said my abilities were a gift of the MalRisse. Kelsoc said that my abilities were the incidental side effect of the Battle of Tau Sigma Five,” Beni said. “If it’s time I’ve been seeing all my life, then, yes, probably it’s well-developed.”

“Probably?”

“Well, how am I to judge my abilities in comparison to a people whose name includes time?”

The Lady President smiled. “Fair enough,” she said. “How do you see this war ending?”

“Everything burns, one way or the other,” Beni said. That, or it froze. “A great conflagration of Gallifrey and Daleks, or the universe burns. The flames of your conflict have cast shadows in my sleep since before I knew what dreams were. There is not much hope.”

“But there is still hope.” While it was a statement, it was still a question.

“For the universe, perhaps. But there is a choice your people are making, a choice between. . .” Beni paused, bit her bottom lip. The lines were clearing, and she was looking at a knot. If her people didn’t choose her, there was only one way the war would end.

“Go on, Benison.”

“If they choose the past’s shade, Gallifrey will be cut off.”

“Cut off? Destroyed? How?”

“I don’t see how, ma’am, just that it happens if they choose him. I don’t even know who he is.”

“I see. As much skill as my people have with time, the future can still be quite. . . nebulous to us. We have seen this conflagration, however, and we seek to avoid it. And you see no way to avoid it.”

“Not with the dread man. His faces shift in my dreams, he sleeps on a bed of faces, he laughs at the universe’s pain and continues on.” Beni realized she’d closed her eyes and opened them. The Lady President’s eyes were sad. Did she guess or know who the dread man was?

“And you say there is no hope?”

“I did not say ‘no hope’, but ‘not much hope.’ There is a figure I’ve seen in my dreams, with tired eyes. He’s always moving in my dreams, weaving in and out, never staying for long—“

“He never does,” the woman said softly, as if she knew who that figure was as well.

“But he helps as he can. And the words echoed in my mind: “No More.” I don’t know what that means, however. It was much easier to understand what I saw when it was people I knew and loved, places I saw every day.”

“I would imagine so,” she said. “You haven’t asked my name.”

“I supposed you would tell me when you wished,” Beni said. “I do not believe you were being kind simply for the sake of kindness.”

“Your opinion of Gallifrey is, unfortunately, well warranted,” the woman said. “Well, even if it’s an after-thought, I’m—“

Before she could finish the sentence, however, an odd wheezing filled the room and a tall blue box appeared nearly in the middle of it. Beni stared at it. Was it made out of wood? Was it a not-tree like Kelsoc’s ship? If so, why was it a battered blue box, its paint streaked and bubbled with scorch marks, the wood pitted from who knew what?

A figure stuck his head out of the door. “Fred, I mean, Lady President, what is so important that you called me in from the front lines? We had just pushed the Daleks back from Quadrant 300 point apple.” His gaze landed on Beni. “Who’s this?”


	8. The Physician's Visit

“Your patient,” the Lady President replied. “Her name’s Benison.” (Was Fred really the Lady President’s name? Beni wished they hadn’t been interrupted.)

“A patient? What’s wrong with her? She looks fine, though a bit out of place here,” he said. The figure stepped out from the box, pulled out a thin cylindrical object from his battered leather jacket, and waved it at her, then frowned at it.

Beni gasped. He had so many faces. At least eight to the past and far more than she could count to the future. Most were indistinct beyond the third or fourth to the future, but they were there regardless. She studied him for a moment, and the faces coalesced around an older man, with a tall tuft of graying hair and kind but tired eyes.

His eyes narrowed at her. “Are you in pain?” he asked. “Probably. Can I see your hands?”

She held them out to him. He crossed the room and gently took one, waved his tool over it. He looked at the Lady President as the tool buzzed. “Who hurt her?” he demanded, his voice like a smith’s hammer. “It wasn’t you, was it?”

“Of course not,” she said, her tone indicating that the question stung. “It was Kelsoc.”

“Kelsoc,” the man growled. “The war has not been kind to her temperament, but she should know better.” He met Beni’s eyes. “There is no common courtesy left on this planet, if there ever were any. For that I apologize. Is the hand feeling better?”

Beni nodded. The ache had eased, especially in comparison to the other hand. “I think so.”

“Good. Other hand, please.” 

She switched hands and the man began waving his tool over it. “What is that?” Beni asked, nodding toward the device.

“Oh, this old thing? Screwdriver.” He frowned at it again. “What did Kelsoc do to you?”

Screwdrivers didn’t look anything like what he was holding, but Beni let that pass. “She shoved me to the floor.” He raised an eyebrow. “After I ran around the console of her ship messing with the controls.”

The man snorted in laughter. “Spunk. I like spunk. No doubt Kelsoc deserved it.” He put away the screwdriver, patted her hand softly, then looked at the Lady President, who seemed to have suppressed a smile. “Mind telling me why there’s a human from the Guin Colony in your office?”

How did he know where she was from?

“The High Council and I became aware of Benison’s time sense when it was discovered that the Daleks planned to use her for their purposes.”

“So out of the abundant kindness of the Council’s hearts, they decided to rescue her from that fate and do the same thing here on Gallifrey.” The sarcasm was apparent in the man’s weary tone. “I’m not sure the war can take much more of the Council’s kindnesses.”

“I got her away from Kelsoc,” the woman snapped. “If you think you could do so much better, why don’t you be Lord President again?”

The man burst into laughter. “Oh, yes, me as Lord President again, that would work out just fine. I’d rather punch an azbantium wall for four billion years than be Lord President of Gallifrey again.”

“I would rather have you as president again than have the High Council resurrect the Lord Rassilon, which is the current suggestion before them, since they see me as being weak on the war, as not ruthless enough against the Daleks.”

“Oh, you’ve been plenty ruthless,” he replied. “You know my opinion on that. And no one is more ruthless than the Daleks. But Rassilon? Have they lost their minds?”

Beni didn’t know who Rassilon was, but if the man who’d fixed her hands was worried, so was she. She took another sip from her drink and kept listening. One could learn a lot by keeping one’s mouth shut.

“They are worried about the Matrix prophecies, as you well know,” the Lady President said. “And they are concerned about the Daleks burning Gallifrey to ashes.”

“Kelsoc waited till my village had burnt to the ground and everyone but me exterminated by the Daleks,” Beni interjected. Sometimes, speaking was more important than being quiet. Both looked sharply at her. “She as good as said it was to induce me to help you all in your war effort. And if you approved of that…all I ever wanted was a normal life. No nightmares, no Daleks, and no Time Lords, thank you very much.”

“You have nothing to go back to?” the Lady President asked, and the man eyed her, seemingly uneasy. 

He interrupted the Lady President before she could speak again. “Nothing is so subjective, Lady President. Benison and I should have a chat, so we can determine the extent of the ‘nothing’.”

“I know that tone, Doctor. It’s your ‘I’m up to something’ tone.”

“I told you, don’t call me that,” the Doctor said, shifting uncomfortably in his leather jacket. “And I am not ‘up to something’.” He smiled at Beni. “Well, no more than I usually am, anyway.”

Beni smiled back. Why didn’t he want to be called Doctor? Admittedly, it was a strange name for a being to have, but so was Benison. Or Fred, for that matter. But why had he visibly bristled at being called his own name?

“I still think you’re up to something,” the Lady President said, standing, smoothing out her robes. “But, fine, have your chat with her. I’m sure I have to deal with the Council, or with Kelsoc at the very least on this matter. By the way, how did you get your TARDIS into my office without setting off an alarm?”

He waved a hand nonchalantly at her. “Oh, you’ll give me the codes. Though the old girl is capable of getting into pretty much anywhere, I’ll warrant. Even straight into the Panopticon if I needed.”

She shook her head. “Haven’t lost your sense of humor, I see. Well, keep your secrets, Doctor. I’ll go deal with the politicians.” She moved to the door, her guards following, leaving Beni alone with the Doctor.


	9. A Short Chat

Once the door closed, the Doctor again smiled at her. “Don’t worry, Benison—“

“Beni. My friends and family call…called me Beni.” While she didn't officially have a friend in the universe, part of her saw the Doctor as someone who could be a new friend. She returned his smile.

Despite the smile, he wore a troubled look. “Beni it is,” he said. “When you first saw me, you gasped. Why was that? It wasn’t pain, was it?”

“No, it wasn’t,” she said. How to explain something she’d always lived with, she wasn’t sure. “You have a lot of faces.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Faces? What do you mean?”

“I’ve always been able to see people’s faces, how they are and how they change and will change,” Beni said, the words bubbling out of her faster than she expected. This Doctor was dangerous, but she somehow trusted him, anyway. And maybe, just maybe, she was speaking to someone who would understand her. “I usually can block it out when I need to so I can see them in the present. And, well, I don’t know why, but you Time Lords have lots of faces rather than just one that changes. And you have the most of those I’ve seen. Eight past faces and—“

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “I don’t see how there can be any future faces of mine, not with this war and the way it seems likely to end, but if there are, I don’t want to know.”

“You’re not going to ask how I can see them?”

“I assume your abilities originated with the time rifts above Guin Colony, called by the locals the MalRisse, caused by the Battle of Tau Sigma Five.” He sighed. "It's not the first time such a thing has happened, probably won't be the last. Yours is more unique, though."

“I’ve been told something like that,” Beni answered. "Your friend the President seems highly interested in it."

“And I take it that you’ve no interest in predicting the future for the Lady President and the High Council.”

Beni shook her head. “No, no, I do not.”

“That will no doubt cause a spot of trouble. If, of course, you were here to cause it.”

“Of course. I can cause more than a spot of trouble, if it comes down to it.”

His eyes gleamed with laughter. “I don’t doubt it, but I do doubt that you have anything to say about the war that they haven’t already heard.”

“Gallifrey will burn. Gallifrey will freeze,” Beni blurted, the images etched in her mind. “It’ll burn and it’ll be frozen and it all revolves around—“

“Don’t tell me.” The Doctor sighed. “They’ll pull a doddering old bureaucrat out of his tomb and Gallifrey ends up in a handbasket headed down to-- Never mind, yes, nothing new. There’s only one way this war will end, but I keep hoping it won’t have to happen that way.” 

He suddenly clapped his hands. “Never mind this maudlin old man. Tell me, would you like to go somewhere you can have that normal life?”

“No Time Lords? No Daleks? No war?” She paused. “No nightmares?”

“I can’t promise the last one but the other three, I guarantee it.”

“I’ve lived with nightmares since forever,” Beni said. “Small price for a normal life, whatever that’s like.”

He held out his hand. “Then, come with me,” he said.

She grabbed his hand and followed him into the blue box.


	10. The Pursued

Beni stared around at the huge room they had entered. Like the cathedral in the capital on Guin, its ceiling soared higher than any sentinel tree. Shadowed corners--some more light would probably make the room seem smaller, somehow. Pillars of what seemed to be stone held everything up, and in the center, a console. She wondered if the Doctor ever felt like a room this big was empty, even with himself in it.

“It’s bigger—“

“On the inside, yes,” the Doctor said, letting go of her hand and circling around the controls. “Didn’t you notice that with Kelsoc’s ship?”

“I was more focused on the Daleks surrounding me than the interior of her ship,” Beni said. “Which then surrounded me.”

“Understandable. Daleks are very distracting.”

“And the inside of her ship wasn’t so clearly larger.”

“Ah, she still had the original setting, did she? We change it every so often, usually when I change my face," the Doctor said, fondly patting the console. "If there’s a next time I might go for something more organic-looking." The Doctor looked up then, as if suddenly startled by her presence, then grinned at her. Beni got the impression that such actual grins were rare these days. “How about that normal life, then?”

“Yes, please.”

Someone knocked on the door. “I know you’re in there!” came the Lady President’s voice. “I should have never left the room.”

“Oh, she knew exactly what I would do, that’s why she left,” the Doctor muttered. “Damn plausible deniability.” 

He flicked a switch and pulled down a monitor, which showed the Lady President standing outside the TARDIS, hands on her hips. “I know you can hear me in there,” she said.

“Well, yes, you do know that, Fred,” the Doctor said. “But I’ve got the feeling the old girl’s on my side in this and isn’t letting you in.”

“Is she in there with you?”

“I don’t think you want the answer to that question,” he replied. 

“So, yes, then.”

“Is it polite to ask questions you already know the answers to?” 

“Is it rude to run away and take my guest away before the end of a visit?”

“Guest? Ha! Don’t make this old man laugh.” The Doctor spun a lever and the ship thrummed with energy. “She doesn’t know anything that you all haven’t heard and yet they’re still going to pull ol’ Razzle-Dazzle out of his retirement.” His look got serious and his tone softened. “Please do look after yourself.”

She sighed, still clearly annoyed. “Doctor, please—“

“Don’t call me that,” he snapped. “I’ll be back at the frontlines soon enough; you know the whens to contact me at.” He flicked a switch—the monitor flickered off—and then he threw another lever and Beni felt something move. Whether it was the ship or time or both, she didn’t know.

The Doctor heaved a sigh and ran a hand through his hair. "Well, that's over," he said. "You have any questions for me?"

“Why don’t you want to be called Doctor?” she asked. 

He clearly hadn't been expecting that--Beni found that she hadn't expected to ask out loud. The look on the Doctor's present face got very closed. “I am not the person who chose that name. Not any more, at any rate,” he replied shortly. “I have seen and done things that would harrow any person and probably I will see more and will do more terrible things before the end. It’s not who I am anymore; it’s very likely I won’t be that person ever again.”

Was he saying he’d abandoned his morals to fight in the Time War? Beni didn’t immediately answer, seeing as she could see some of his future faces and wondered if they would call themselves Doctor or not. But she knew he didn’t want to know the future, either, and she guessed that he couldn’t believe one existed and so didn’t want to hear about it. But yet he had stolen her away and was taking her someplace normal and that would be enough. Quite a contrary person, this Doctor.

After a few moments of silence, the Doctor pulled another lever. “We’re having to skate the edge of Quadrant Delta Pi to get to where we’re headed, rather than go straight through it. Too much fighting. Press and hold the button.”

She did so. “I take it you don’t like fighting?”

“Does it matter if I do or not? I’m fighting anyway, aren’t I? Not like I’ve much choice in the matter,” the Doctor said. “Look at me, the renegade, still fighting for his people he ran away from against the Daleks. They don’t call me up unless they’ve got some task for me to do, or worse, you know.”

"I sometimes dreamed of running away," Beni admitted, immediately feeling that churn in her stomach that usually accompanied such admissions. Even if said admissions had been usually silent.

"But you stayed."

"Yes."

"Why?"

It seemed that he genuinely wanted to know. "I love--loved them," Beni said. "Who else would save them when they couldn't save themselves? They're my people, after all."

"That's an awfully big responsibility for someone as young as you are," the Doctor said, his face grave. 

"I suppose it was. Sometimes I was angry that I didn't get a normal childhood like the others in my village, but, without me, they wouldn't have had one."

"So it was your only option."

“No, there’s always more than one option," Beni said. "I’m not entirely sure what those options were, for me, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned while growing up and seeing time and all its branches, it’s that there’s always other options. Some options are better than others but I still had to choose.”

The Doctor nodded. “You stayed and I ran, but here we are anyway. Because as much as I dislike the whole rotten bunch of them, they’re still my people. They don’t deserve to be exterminated.”

“No one does.”

“Ah, well, you've hit the crux of the matter, haven’t you? And if that means I fight against the Daleks, what of it? And what about the Daleks, then? Should I have stopped them before they’d even started? I think of that a lot,” he said. “But they were people, too, not so long ago and yet so so long ago. But the Time War isn’t philosophical, unfortunately.”

He’d had the chance to stop the Daleks before they’d even started? Beni wasn’t quite sure how that was possible, but then she remembered that she was dealing with a being who traveled in space and time. Perhaps one such as him had the weight of the universe on him, whether or not he wanted the job. That was an awfully big responsibility for one person.

Somewhere, a speaker crackled, making Beni jump. “Attention, Doctor,” a voice said. “Prepare to stop your time capsule and be boarded.”

Had they been followed and pursued? Fear gripped Beni’s heart; she looked over at the Doctor, who was now glaring at a monitor. “Are they going to take me back to Gallifrey?”

His face softened for a moment, and he shook his head. “I’d like to see them try it,” the Doctor said. He flicked a switch. “Don’t you all have better things to be doing?”


	11. The Bluff

“Prepare to stop your time capsule and be boarded,” the voice repeated. It sounded tinny, pre-packaged, matter-of-fact, devoid of personality. Beni shivered. She didn’t want to fall in with whomever owned that voice.

The Doctor rolled his eyes. “Look, I’m on important war business here, you all have no right to stop me,” he said.

The ship shifted to the right, and Beni grabbed onto the console to steady herself.

“I am on the orders of the Lord President,” the voice responded. “Prepare to be boarded.”

The Doctor slapped a palm against something on the console; the voice squelched off. 

“Don’t they mean Lady President?” Beni asked.

“Seems as if they’ve had an election,” he replied. “Unfortunately.”

“I hope she’s all right.”

The hardness in the Doctor’s eyes wavered for a moment. “Me, too,” he said. The ship rocked to the right, hard. “But we’ve got more immediate things to worry about at present.” He pushed the spot he’d slapped—“Lord President, you say? Extend my congratulations to the new president,” he said. “But I am still on important war business and must continue on.”

“Your time capsule must be checked for contraband,” came the answer. “We have reason to believe that you have contraband.”

Were they talking about her? Beni was certain they were. Of course Gallifreyans would see humans as contraband. She closed her eyes and tried to see how this situation would play out. Too many paths splayed out from where they stood by the console, too many to count. Only a handful had positive outcomes. She opened her eyes. “Do you have contraband?” she asked. “Other than me?”

“Who doesn’t,” the Doctor muttered as his gaze flicked toward Beni. “I don’t even know what’s in half the TARDIS’ rooms.” His voice grew louder as he addressed their pursuer. “I can assure you that you were misinformed,” he said. “I have pressing business to attend to. There’s a war going on after all.”

“You have an asset vital to the war in your time capsule.”

“Vital war asset, that’s me,” the Doctor answered. “One that you’re holding up from doing his job.”

“The human from the Guin Colony.” This statement was punctuated with another violent rocking of the ship. The console beneath Beni’s hands nearly hissed with anger. If Kelsoc’s ship had been sentient, the Doctor’s ship was even more so. At least where personality was concerned.

“Oh, her?” the Doctor replied in a breezy tone. He winked at Beni. “Back on Gallifrey. We had a chat and tea, that’s all. I’m sure she’s sequestered in some squalid cell or looped into some Matrix-console, just as the High Council wanted. None of my concern.”

“If we find that you’ve taken her—"

“Then the Lord President will have a stern scolding for me, I’m sure,” the Doctor said. “May I be on my way?”

The speaker’s crackle snapped off. The Doctor peered into the monitor beside the console. “Well, that was easier than expected.”

“That was easy?” Beni asked, loosening her fingers from their death-grip on the console. “That was just you bluffing.”

The Doctor huffed a sigh and ran a hand through his graying hair. “Perhaps, but I do it rather well, don’t you think?” 

She laughed, a sound that echoed in the nearly empty room, and the corners of the Doctor’s mouth twitched up into the ghost of a smile. He had no idea that he’d just looked like at least two of his future faces. And wouldn’t know, since he didn’t want to know. 

“No one’s laughed in here in some time,” he said, looking around at the pillars as if expecting somebody to join them. “I suppose there’s not much laughter left in what’s left of my future, either.”

“You might be surprised.” She hadn’t meant to say that, hadn’t meant for him to infer anything about what she saw in this room, about the future scenes that danced across her mind—a man with close-cropped hair grinning at someone holding tools, the same man and a blonde woman holding hands and swaying, a group of smiling people crowded around the console, a man with floppy hair and a bow-tie spinning in a circle, a woman with red hair merrily waving a hand through the TARDIS door, a gray-haired man with shocking eyebrows anxious to see his friend happy. Certainly the room would have its share of sorrows, too, but not without the joys that made the sorrows worth it.

He looked at her sharply. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t mean to say anything. It’s just—it’s just, there’s so much life in this room,” she said. “I don’t know their names but I see their faces. Yours too. They’re so bright here, and I see so much, and it’s like I’m a child again, trying to find my way through the forest of other people’s experiences and emotions, but it’s just your experiences, there’s so many of them.”

“I know,” he said, nodding. “The TARDIS has a good memory, probably better than mine, which is better than most. But today hasn’t been the most stable of days for any of us, which means there’s bound to be some bleed-through. Pay it no mind.”

She shook her head to clear it and focused on the Doctor’s present face. “I’ll do my best.”

“Excellent. Now,” he said, “we’ve got to make some detours before I drop you off somewhere safe. I’ve been around too long to think that they gave up so easily on getting you back. Want to see the MalRisse up close? Or something else, doesn’t have to be that particular phenomena.”

“What?”

“I’ll take that as a yes.” He patted the console with an air of confidence. “The old girl knows the way.”

The ship thrummed happily as the center of the console slid up and down.

So they were taking a detour past who knew what. Beni wasn’t sure if she was afraid or excited.


	12. The Village

The ship thumped to a stop.

“Where are we? When are we?” Beni asked. Either question could be appropriate, and she didn’t know which was the more likely.

The Doctor squinted a monitor. “Hmm. Well, I doubt they’d look for us here.”

“What?”

“The old girl’s being a bit . . . particular, I think. Seems as if we’re on a planet, not hanging above it as I’d planned. Coming here was not my plan. I—”

“Where?”

“I think you know where. The when, however. . .” The Doctor looked as if he would prefer not to speak further. 

Beni closed her eyes. She had only two paths at present—stay inside the Doctor’s time capsule, or go outside. Either option had its risks. She opened her eyes, met the Doctor’s. “Will I regret going outside or staying inside more?”

“Everyone has regrets, Beni.”

Was rescuing her from his people one of those things? Beni shook away the thought. “If we’re where and when I think we are,” she answered softly, “then I would regret not going out most of all.”

He nodded. “I thought as much.”

Beni crossed the room to the TARDIS door and opened it. Bright spring sunshine streamed into the ship, and she stepped out into the light, blinking. 

The TARDIS had landed next to a still-smoldering sentinel tree. Smoke wafted up on the early morning breeze, the kind of breeze Beni had always looked forward to, the kind she would throw open the windows of her house for. She wrinkled her nose at the acrid smell. 

Some detachment from the capitol must have come and cleaned up, as there were no . . . corpses she could see. Just stone foundations and the charred remains of the homes she’d known so well, the well near the village center, a cracked pottery wheel sitting where the inside of Father’s shop had been. Landmarks of a lost life. Her lost life.

No timelines were left here, except for hers and the Doctor’s.

She heard him come to the door of his ship. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“This isn’t your fault,” Beni replied, keeping her gaze on what was left of her village. “It’s mine.”

“You didn’t start the war. You won’t be the one to end it.”

“No, you’ll end it,” Beni said, turning to meet his gaze. She could see his faces, yes, but here, where there was no one else that she could see, his future danced in her mind’s eye. Before she could stop it from happening, words spilled out of her. “With the Bad Wolf and the Queen’s Consort, with the Witch in the Well and the Raggedy Man, Gallifrey will burn and will freeze and then somehow stand. And then the Hyb—“

“Beni, stop,” the Doctor said, his hands on her shoulders. “No more, please.”

Beni shook her head and the images cleared away. She reached up and wiped tears out of her eyes, then met the Doctor’s gaze again. “I. . .”

“Not your fault,” he said. “I have no idea what any of that meant anyway. Nor will I, I suspect, until I do. That’s normally how it works with me.”

She nodded. “It sounds like something out of a fairytale.”

“You’d be surprised at how much people’s lives are like fairytales,” he answered. “Rather strange that it would be mine, however.”

She pulled away from the Doctor and began walking down the street, not caring if he followed or not.

Her life had been anything but a fairytale, but it had been her life. These had been her people, this had been her home. Funny, how easily something slipped from present tense to past, how one could move from past to present without paying attention to it.

Past the houses and the shops and the burnt-out hulk of the library, she headed toward her dwelling. Half of it appeared to be unburnt. If so, then she could get something to remind her of her home before proceeding on to the normal life that the Doctor had promised.

A necklace given to her by her mother, a book from Dee and Rev, a glazed bowl she’d made on Father’s wheel, some holographs, a leather backpack that smelled strongly of smoke in which she packed the few things she found.

“Time to go,” the Doctor said.

He’d followed her, after all. “I lived here,” she said simply. “For all of my adult life. Until now.”

“Sometimes it’s hard to leave, sometimes it’s not,” he said. “And sometimes it’s harder to return.”

“Do you plan any more detours for us?”

“Depends on the old girl. She knows where I want to take you, but it must be safe. For them and for you.”

Then something in the timelines shivered. Beni grabbed the Doctor’s hand. “Something’s wrong,” she whispered.

“I feel it, too,” he replied, pulling out his screwdriver. He held it in front of them, then studied it. “We need to get back to the TARDIS, now.”

“What is it? Who is it?”

He squeezed her hand and smiled, though the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Just Daleks,” he said. “Let’s go.”


	13. Arrival [of the Daleks]

Just Daleks. The Doctor’s nonchalance wasn’t reassuring. “Daleks, here? Why?”

“I suspect they were hoping you’d return,” the Doctor answered. He heaved a sigh as he moved toward the door. “Though if they see my TARDIS they’ll know they’re in trouble.”

“It’s not trouble they want, though,” Beni said. “It’s me. I won’t help them, either.”

“I don’t expect you would.” He glanced out the door, then back at Beni. “We could always run from building to building and make it back to the TARDIS.”

“Or we could use the tunnels.”

“The what?”

“The tunnels. They were built so that we could hide from invaders. I—I would have a nightmare, Father would tell the elders, we would hide.”

“And then you’d be safe.”

Beni nodded as she slid the bag onto her back. “Each dwelling has a trapdoor that connects to the tunnels.” She kicked at the rug and dislodged it from its place. “As long as they don’t know about those, we can go from here to Eder’s shop and then out and to the TARDIS.”

She yanked up on the trapdoor, revealing a dark hole accompanied by a ladder. 

“After you,” the Doctor said, handing her his screwdriver. “It’s set to scan for Daleks.”

Beni took it and started down. Dust coated her hands and drifted down around her. Lights flickered on as she descended. She looked up at the Doctor. “It’s automatic,” she responded to his unspoken question.

“Makes sense. Do the ones at top go out as we pass them?”

She nodded as the lights above the Doctor’s head went out. 

“Brilliant. You can bet that the grumps on Gallifrey aren’t nearly as clever,” he said, grinning.

“What, they make you descend ladders in the dark?”

“We do everything in the dark,” came his answer.

Beni waited a moment to see if he’d expand on that, but no further explanation came. She kept climbing, thinking of all the times she’d done this before, all the times she’d hidden from some foe who’d wanted to wipe out her and her people, all the times she’d succeeded in saving them. Did those times matter now? Or had they been as futile as Kelsoc had said?

“So, this normal life,” the Doctor said, shaking her out of her thoughts. “What do you expect it to be like?”

“What?”

“That life without Daleks, Time Lords, war, nightmares—what do you want it to be like?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, c’mon,” he said, “you’ve never even imagined it? Somehow I doubt that.”

Her feet hit the floor at the bottom of the ladder, and she stepped to the side so that the Doctor could finish the climb. Scanning the hallway ahead, she answered, “I have imagined it. Never thought it could happen, though.”

“Not even with all those lines around you?”

“They always cut off, for everyone, except mine, and I never—I never could see what my path held. Or I didn’t want to see,” Beni said. “Because how could I believe that something good was out there for me when everyone I loved and everything I knew was gone?”

The Doctor rubbed his chin tiredly, leaving dust in his beard. “Good question. One I don’t have an answer for, unfortunately.”

“But now that they’re gone and I’m still here—well, living on means that the memory of them lives on. I can live up to their sacrifices for me by simply living.” Beni started down the corridor, staying between the cached supplies and boxes that lined either side of the hallway. Someone probably should let the authorities know about the caches, in case it would help them, but she was too busy at present to do so, that was for sure.

“What if the life lived isn’t worthy of the sacrifices?”

Beni had the feeling he wasn’t talking about her life, though maybe he was. “I guess we keep trying,” she said. “We keep trying.”

“What does trying look like for you?”

“A house of my own, with a garden,” she said. “The chance to work with clay, as my father did. Time to read, to cook, to be. To not be afraid of the future. Or of myself.” Ignoring his quizzical look, she stopped beneath another ladder. He wasn’t the only one who could refuse to expand on something said. “This should be the ladder up to Eder’s shop.”

The device in her hands suddenly buzzed like disturbed bees. The Doctor snatched it out of her hand and glared at it, then looked at her, his eyes concerned. He pointed up, shook his head, then nodded toward the next ladder over and headed toward it. 

She pulled at his jacket. “That’s not—“

He held a finger up to her lips, then pointed at the screwdriver, which was still angrily buzzing, and then toward the top of Eder’s ladder.

“Daleks?” she whispered.

He nodded. “Will this ladder get us near the TARDIS?”

“It’s a little bit past the TARDIS but if we’re not seen, we can get there. Less cover, though.”

“We’ll have to chance it,” he said.

“After you,” Beni said, gesturing toward the ladder they now stood under.


	14. Above Ground

The Doctor seemed rather spry for someone who also seemed as if he were carrying the whole universe. He ascended the ladder fairly quickly, Beni following. At the top he shoved open the trapdoor and pulled himself out, then offered her a hand. Once they were out, they crept through what remained of the bakery. Beni and the Doctor glanced around the corner of the building—there was the TARDIS, big and blue and out in the open.

A lone Dalek was gliding back and forth in front of the ship’s doors. A sentry.

Beni hefted a hunk of charred wood she’d spotted on the ground. “I can sort this,” she said.

“No, don’t,” the Doctor said, his hand on her upper arm. “Wait. There could be more of them.”

She glared at him. Had the Doctor actually been fighting on the frontline of the Time War? Was he being reticent about destroying Daleks? Yes, they’d been talking about how even Daleks were sentient life, but he didn’t actually mean that, did he? They were Daleks. They wouldn’t stop being Daleks just because you were nice to them. They would still be Daleks, and they would still set one’s bones aglow with their death-lights. Then again, batting at one with a hunk of wood probably wouldn’t achieve much, either. Except maybe making her feel a tiny bit better.

They glanced around the corner of the building again. Two other Daleks trundled up to the first. “Report,” the first one said.

“No sign of the Doctor or the seer detected,” the second one said, the third Dalek echoing it.

“See,” the Doctor said. “That’s why we waited.”

“Their voices get on my nerves,” Beni whispered, ignoring the fact that he’d been correct.

“Their voices would get on their nerves,” the Doctor whispered back. “If they were aware of the discrepancy between what they wanted and what they’re saying.”

That didn’t make any sense. “Daleks don’t want anything,” Beni replied. “They just destroy everything.”

“Ah, but wanting destruction is still a want,” the Doctor answered. “It’s just not one that takes others into account.”

“It’s not just Daleks who don’t take other people’s wants into account,” Beni said, thinking of stories she’d heard of the war, thinking of Kelsoc, thinking of how this village had been burnt as some sort of chess move.

“That’s true,” the Doctor said. He fished in his pocket for something, pressed it into her hand. “The _key_ element in it is what we choose to do.”

“So what are we going to do?”

The Doctor grinned widely. “Make a distraction!”

Before she could answer, he jumped out from behind the building and into the open square. “Oi, Daleks!” he shouted, waving his arms, his screwdriver gripped in one hand. “Look, I’m a target!”

No one had ever mentioned that the Doctor was…well, was suicidal the right word? Insane? Beni didn’t have time to suss that out, as the Daleks swiveled their gazes toward them. The Doctor kept moving to the left, waving his arms.

“THE DOCTOR IS DETECTED,” the Daleks shouted as only Daleks could. Others intoned, “SCAN FOR THE SEER.” They fanned out and began gliding toward the building, toward the corner where they were.

She ran to the right, looping around the building, skidding to a stop outside the corner opposite of where she had been. She peeked out from behind the corner. The Doctor was now on the far side of the TARDIS. Two Daleks had followed him. Where was the third? Was it behind her or in front of her?

Beni glanced behind her. No Dalek. But she didn’t see one in the square, either. Perhaps it was still gliding toward her. She unclenched her hand to see that the Doctor had given her a key. But to what?

She looked across the square at the TARDIS. Was it a key to the ship? But what about the Doctor?

“THE SEER IS DETECTED,” rasp-shouted a Dalek from behind her. “CAPTURE THE SEER.”

Beni sprinted, hard, across the open square to the TARDIS’ threshold. Balancing on it, she stuck the key in the lock. The ship seemed to purr underneath her hands, then hissed like an angry cat. “C’mon, c’mon, please let me in,” Beni said. The door opened; Beni stumbled in, hitting the floor.

“Ouch, what was that for,” Beni said, scrambling to her feet. Something opened on the console—another keyhole.

Beni pulled the key from the door and stuck it in the console’s keyhole. The center column began sliding up and down. The floor shifted under her feet. “No, no, we can’t leave,” Beni said, fighting down a sense of panic, “we can’t leave the Doctor behind, we need him.”

She got the sense that the ship was laughing. At her, actually. This ship definitely had more personality than Kelsoc’s. Unfortunately, said personality was mocking her somehow. And how were they going to get to the Doctor? She didn’t know how to fly the Gallifreyan’s ship.

The Doctor’s voice wafted in through the open door. “Beni, are you in there?”

“Doctor!” Beni dashed to the door, hanging onto it when it became apparent that they were far from the ground. Hanging from the edge of the door was the Doctor. 

“Would you mind helping me up?” he asked.

She did, taking one of his hands and pulling him into the safety of his ship.

“Thank you, Beni,” he said, dusting himself off. He suddenly laughed. “I haven’t had that much fun in quite some time!”

“Fun?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. He crossed the room and patted the console. “I knew the old girl would pick me up. Can’t bear to be separated from me, after all.”

Beni suspected that one went both ways. “Nice of you to tell me.”

“You figured it out, that’s all that matters,” the Doctor said. He spun another dial and pulled a lever. “Now, let’s see if we can get the coordinates more exact this time.”

“Why didn’t the Daleks shoot you?”

The Doctor pulled another lever, then paused. “I’ve no idea,” he said shortly. “They’ve had plenty of opportunities to do so, and yet they keep failing. I’m somehow not convinced that it’s all my doing, though of course I’ll happily take the credit. Daleks are quizzical creatures in some ways.”

“Will they keep looking for me?”

“Uncertain,” he said, beginning to pull levers again. “The planet I’ve in mind for you is pretty well protected. I know I’m not supposed to have favorites, but I can’t help myself.”

She had no idea what he was talking about. “What planet is that?”


	15. Partings

The Doctor smiled. “Earth.”

“But Earth’s polluted, barely anyone lives there anymore,” Beni said, gripping the console as the ship flew. “How could you be taking me to Earth?”

The Doctor flipped another lever and spinning a dial. “The Earth I’m most familiar with is nothing like the one you’ve seen on the governmental webs of Guin Colony.”

“Right, this is a time machine,” Beni said. How could she have forgotten that? “You’ll be taking me to the past? What about—“

“Well, you just can’t play the stock market, need to keep out of the way of plot developments, that sort of thing,” the Doctor replied. “I’ve been away for a while, but I have friends there. Good people.”

‘Better than me’ was what Beni could see etched in his expression. She could see the phantoms of days past in the console room’s shadows; could he? Was that why he looked so awfully awfully tired?

“Beni?”

She shook her head. “Got lost in a thought.”

He harrumphed in a friendly sort of way. “Long day.”

“Longer than most, for me,” she said. 

“Adrenaline’s good for humans,” he answered, spinning a dial. “Reminds you that you’re alive. Keeps you smart, fast. Too much isn’t good, but compared to none? Hmm.” His gaze sharply shifted from Beni to one of the screens in which gold circles spiraled. “Hmm.”

Beni circled the far side of the console, lightly touching it as she did. It hummed under her touch, nearer to buzzing than purring. Something was wrong. “Doctor?”

“Lost in a thought,” he said. “Honestly that’s not too surprising, I have a lot of them.”

“I’ll bet,” Beni said. “What’s wrong?”

“Wrong? Nothing wrong. Course laid in for Earth, sometime in the late 1980s or 1990s, I can never get that right…”

He still looked rather disconcerted by whatever he’d seen on the screen. “You’re a terrible liar for a Time Lord,” Beni said.

“Would you know I’m probably the best liar in the bunch?” he asked. “Well, second-best, I somehow keep falling for those stupid disguises of—"

His nostalgic-sounding babble was not comforting. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, we somehow picked up a follower,” he answered, too casually. “Tracking us through the time vortex.”

“Is it the Daleks?” Their last scrape had been too close for comfort—Beni certainly didn’t want the next to be any closer.

“They’re keeping far enough back that I don’t honestly know,” he answered. “Could be Daleks, could be my people.”

“I am contraband, after all.”

He laughed shortly, patted the console fondly. “If I followed that rule we’d have nearly no friends.”

“Am I a friend?”

“Well, you’re contraband, aren’t you?” His teasing smile faded into a frown. She couldn’t imagine him being truly happy except in the scenes she could still see flickering on the edges of her vision, past and future. “This war has gone on too long.”

The present, however? Little joy was in it. Hers too.

“Your war has consumed many many lives.”

“Yours not the least,” he answered. 

She nodded. “Yours too.”

“Ah, well, mine’s never been worth too much,” he said. “I ’spect it’ll be worth even less at the end of it all.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“This war will end, Beni, and probably me with it. Be worth it, though, to end this war.”

The column in the center of the column rose again and then ceased moving. Did that mean they were there?

The Doctor pulled a notepad and a pen from the interior of his jacket. He wrote on it, the pen swirling across the page and somehow Beni saw letters skittering across the page. How did his hand move such fluidly, round and round, and yet produce letters in a straight line? Did all Time Lords write in multiple languages at once? Were all Time Lords’ handwriting so messy? That old joke, about doctors’ handwriting, was it about—

He pulled the page off the notepad, folded it, and handed it to her. “The two names on the front,” he said. 

“Friends?”

“Just tell ‘em I sent you. Friend of a friend. Letter explains it.” He dug into his jacket again, pulled out a thin plastic card. He handed it to her. “Should be useful. I’m sure UNIT will let you, they’re friends, too. Well, some of them.”

Beni tucked the letter and the card into her bag, re-shouldered it. She offered him a tentative smile. In that universe where there’d been no war and yet she’d still met the Doctor, she was trying to stay. But in this universe it wasn’t meant to be. The paths were different here. “This is it, then.”

“New life. A normal life,” the Doctor said, returning the smile, though he suddenly looked wistful. “Something to be cherished, anyway, for as long as one has it. If anyone bothers you, start talking about the Shadow Proclamation—they’ll probably be around longer than us scary Time Lords, at any rate, and they’ve got rules about that sort of thing.”

On impulse, she hugged him. He smelled of wind and soot and, faintly, of some sort of soap. He didn’t move, didn’t return the hug. She got the feeling that no one had hugged him in quite some time.

Beni pulled back from him, her hands still on her shoulders. “Thank you,” she said. 

Surprise crossed his face. “Right thing to do,” he said, his eyes gleaming. “It’s why she called me.” He suddenly turned around, as if to hide his face.

Beni crossed the short distance to the door, opened it, and looked back. “Thank you, Doctor,” she repeated.

He turned back. “I—you’re welcome, Benison,” he said gruffly. “Go have what I cannot.”

Beni stepped out of the blue box and found herself in what seemed to be a park of some sort. Off in the distance there were houses. The box wheezed and disappeared.

She pulled the letter out and stared at it. The letters coalesced into Guin script and Beni squinted at it. How would she find these people? She didn’t even know where she was, except ‘on Earth’, and that answer was terrifyingly vague. Tucking the note back in the bag, she gazed toward the houses. Maybe one of the people there would be able to help. If this planet was home to the Doctor’s friends, she’d certainly be safe in asking them. Wouldn’t she?

Something grabbed her arm. “Lost?” an unfamiliar voice sneered.

Beni twisted in their grasp and pulled back as the hand dropped away from her arm. She suppressed the urge to gasp.

There stood a glowering Kelsoc.


	16. Meetings

Kelsoc’s face was different, but Beni could see the face she’d first met, blurred, off to the side of the present face. Kelsoc still loomed over her, still radiated danger, still wore armor with swirling gold insignia. The glower was the same, too.

His voice, however, was not.

This was not something she’d known about Time Lords. Whatever the process was, it explained the faces. That fact didn’t worry her—the fact that Kelsoc was _here_ , on Earth, and she was alone, _did_.

“You thought to escape us without fulfilling the reason for which you exist,” Kelsoc said, eyes flinty. “The Lord President requires your presence.”

“I don’t think so,” Beni answered, stepping back from the Time Lord. “I’m not working for a reanimated corpse.”

“You don’t get a choice in this,” Kelsoc sneered, stalking forward as Beni moved backward.

“See, that’s where you’re wrong,” Beni said. She whirled around and took off running, toward the houses, leaving Kelsoc spluttering behind her.

The gravity here was a little different, she discovered. Not too much, as Guin’s first humans had been originally from Earth, eager to have someplace ‘Earth-like’, but different enough that it made running more awkward than Beni was used to. Still, within a few paces, she’d found the rhythm of it and ran hard.

She sped past small leafy trees and other trees—deciduous ones. All shorter than the sentinel trees. They probably didn’t have sentinel trees, did they?

Beni went through an open gate and onto a sunny patch of concrete along a differently-colored patch of concrete, stopping short as a vehicle breezed past like a storm’s wind. Oh, a _street_. With actual _cars_ , all huge and heaving pollution into the atmosphere. Like in the history books. She glanced behind—no Kelsoc. That didn’t signify anything, not when he had a ship that could melt and meld with the environment. Why hadn’t the Doctor’s ship picked up on the existence of Kelsoc’s? Had he been in the ship that had been tracking the Doctor’s ship?

Beside her, and across the street, stone fences demarcated between the concrete that ran along the road and the space in front of the houses. Sometimes that space was grass and other plants, sometimes gravel, sometimes paved. People were walking up and down the slender section of concrete, moving past her in either direction. What was the word for it? A walkside? A walking way?

Hard to think when someone was chasing you. And when there were so many people here, the varied threads of their lives sprawling in all directions. Beni blinked back tears. It would take some practice to ignore this many stories, to not be rude and follow the strands of strangers’ lives. How could she find any of the Doctor’s friends in this place? She glanced up and down the walkside, hoping to see something that would help.

A dark-haired woman stopped in front of Beni. “Can I help you?” she asked, her eyes kind. “You look rather lost.”

“Someone’s chasing me—Could you—" Beni blurted. Would she be believed?

“Say no more,” the woman said. “Follow me.”

Beni followed, trotting after the woman down the walkside. A few houses down, the woman pushed open the gate and went through, and Beni followed still, trying to calm her breathing.

Once they were inside the house (presumably the woman’s, but Beni couldn’t remember what Earth’s property rules were), the woman turned to face Beni, her hands on her hips. “Who’s after you?”

Beni bit her lip. Her story would be too fantastical for someone in this time period, wouldn’t it? If her clothing didn’t already make her dangle like a dry branch. And how did this woman understand her? Hadn’t there been linguistic shifts since this time?

“You can tell me,” the woman said. “I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”

“Well, a friend dropped me off,” Beni started. She rubbed her upper arm which Kelsoc had grabbed. It had probably bruised. “In the park. And he gave me the names of some friends of his who could help me out and then the person chasing me showed up and I ran.”

“Do you still have the names?”

Beni nodded and dug the paper out of her bag, then handed it to the woman.

The woman read the names, then flipped open the note. “Then I _did_ hear it,” she said, mostly to herself. “And I missed him. Again.”

She’d heard it? Missed _him_? _Again_? Did she mean that wheezing sound the Doctor’s ship had made? Did she mean the Doctor? Did that mean she was one of the Doctor’s friends? Did that mean Beni could trust her?

The woman handed the note back to Beni. “I’m Sarah Jane,” the woman said, smiling, extending her empty hand toward her. “You’ve met the Doctor.”

Beni studied the woman a little more closely. While she was also human, the threads of her life bore fuzzed edges and loops in places. Nothing like the Doctor’s snarled knots, nor even the Lady President’s lace-like timelines, but enough to know that this woman had also traveled in time and space.

“Benison,” Beni said, shaking Sarah Jane’s hand.

“This note of his doesn’t mention you being chased,” she said, all business-like. “But that you _are_ seeking refuge here on Earth. We’ll get both sorted out, don’t you worry.”

“He said to start talking about something called the Shadow Proclamation, if anyone bothered me,” Beni said. “Do you know what that is?”

Sarah Jane shook her head. “It’s not something I’ve heard about, but it sounds important.”

“I doubt it will scare off the Time Lord I have wanting to abduct me,” Beni answered. “And take me back to Gallifrey.”

“Humans aren’t allowed on Gallifrey,” Sarah Jane said, as if she had knowledge about these things. Perhaps she did.

“Well, it’s not like I’d be a _guest_ there,” Beni said. “An astronomical phenomena gave me some abilities they find useful, and they want me to use those abilities for them. I’d prefer not to.”

Sarah Jane took in that information as if she dealt with these kind of things every day. Maybe she did. “I see. That might be a problem.”

“But my abilities could help us, too,” Beni said. “I just…just have to figure out the best way to send the Gallifreyan away.”

“Hmmm,” Sarah Jane replied. “I’ll make us a pot of tea.”

“It’s good for the synapses.”

Sarah Jane smiled. “That it is.”

She stepped into her kitchen and began bustling around.

If they couldn’t get rid of Kelsoc, what would they do? Beni thought they’d shaken Kelsoc when they’d detoured to Guin Colony, but somehow she and the Doctor had been tracked here. And now the Doctor wasn’t here. What could they do against a Time Lord without one on their side?

Beni sucked in a shaky breath. The day wasn’t over yet, and that wasn’t useful thinking. Kelsoc _could be_ defeated somehow, but how?

That was the question of the hour, and she hadn’t a clue.


	17. What One Insects Says To One Spider

The tea _did_ help. At least, in the sense that it was soothing. It had been nearly forty-five minutes and they’d neither been besieged by Kelsoc nor come upon a good idea that would get them to send Kelsoc packing.

“What can you do?” Sarah Jane asked, picking up the pen she laid down to sip from her teacup. “I mean, beyond whatever it is that this Time Lord wants you for. We should think of a career for you.”

“A career?” Beni asked. “I’ve never thought of having one.”

“Do your people not have careers?”

Beni shifted in her seat. “They did—do— _will_ ,” she said. Tenses were tricky, weren’t they? “But no one in my village expected me to work. Well, not like they did, anyway. I protected us, for as long as I could. And then the Daleks—”

“I see,” Sarah Jane said. “How did you protect them?”

“I saw the danger in the branches,” she answered. “And before the leaves uncurled, we’d prune the tree. Something like that.”

“I’m no arborist,” Sarah Jane said, “but I suspect you’re talking in metaphors anyway.”

“It’s called the web of time,” came a voice.

Beni twisted in her seat, only to see Kelsoc standing just outside the room. If time were a web, were Gallifreyans the spiders? Did they hoard lives to feed on, all wrapped in dainty, sticky, lethal threads of seconds, minutes, days, years? Did they sit, bloated with power and prestige and pride, on their planet, with feelers spread throughout time, throughout the universe? What were spiders to insects?

“Excuse, what are you doing in my house?” Sarah Jane said, pushing back her chair and standing, her hands moving to her hips. “You don’t have permission to be here.”

“Do not try that with me, human,” Kelsoc said, in a tone that equated _human_ with something akin to the Guin word for _tree-rat_. “Your dwelling has no ability to keep me out; it is far too—"

“If you say _primitive_ , I’ll be cross,” Beni said. “Why didn’t your timeship make a sound when landing?”

Kelsoc sniffed. “I, unlike some people, do not leave the brakes on when traveling. Some Gallifreyans have actual respect for themselves and their conveyances.”

Beni was certain the Doctor loved his TARDIS, but now wasn’t the time to stick up for them. “I know why you’re here,” she said. “I didn’t need to see the web of time to know that. But I refuse, and you know that, too.”

“I am here on a mission from the Lord President of Gallifrey,” Kelsoc intoned, his eyes half-rolled in boredom or ceremony. “He requires that you come to Gallifrey on urgent business.”

“No,” Beni said, delicately and deliberately setting her teacup back onto its saucer.

“You know what is at stake, and yet you refuse?”

“Do I dare disturb the universe?” Beni asked. To the side, Sarah Jane snickered. Apparently Eliot was in the past already. “You might as well ask a leaf to stop a rock from dropping into a pond.”

“The Lord President asks it.”

Beni stood up. She closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath and let it out. “The Lord President would not, will not get the answers he wants,” Beni said, opening her eyes again and fixing her gaze on Kelsoc. “Every branch I see leads to conflagration, to calamity, to catastrophe. Gallifrey falls.” _And freezes_. “Gallifrey _will burn,_ Gallifrey _burns_ , wreathed in fire and smoke, just as you let my village burn. Nothing I can do will stop it. Nothing I say will stop it. Nothing. _Nothing_. You dare resist time? Resist fate? You, who walk in time as I once walked in the forest near my village? Don’t your people have laws about this sort of thing?”

“This is war,” Kelsoc said, red in the face. “The Daleks—“

“Oh, they burn, too,” Beni answered. “That’s how the Time War ends, in mutual spontaneous combustion.” _A sudden ice age._

“Gallifrey has no other fate? I have no other fate?”

Beni smiled as sweetly as she could. _Not one I’d tell you or your corpse-king_. “No. So the question is, would you rather be _with_ your people when the end comes, or far, far away from home? That is the choice that lies before you—to burn with those with whom you belong, or to live on in a yawning universe of loneliness.” That wasn’t a choice Kelsoc had left Beni with, but now it was the one left open to him. “Either way, I’m not going to Gallifrey. Simply put, my own path does not lead there.”

“Why did you not lead with that fact?” Kelsoc said. “If the web doesn’t show you there, you cannot go there, whatever the Lord President says. That would risk the continuity of time itself.” He nodded his head shortly, spun on his heel and walked into the hallway mirror, which apparently wasn’t the hallway mirror. The mirror shimmered and disappeared, revealing the actual mirror on the wall behind it.

“Not the biggest person on pleasantries, is he?” Sarah Jane asked.

“The Doctor said that the war hasn’t been good for them,” Beni answered. “He’s scared. I think a lot of them are. And the Doctor’s out there trying to save them.”

“Of course he is,” Sarah Jane said. “He’s the Doctor.”

“He may not think that about himself right now,” Beni said. “But I agree.”

“Now, about that career…”


	18. A (Mostly) Normal Life

Benison Zuflucht had spent the last twenty or so years on Earth, mostly near London, but sometimes traveling to other places across the planet. Events unfurled in the ways the branches meandered, though occasionally there were thorns or tight whorls in the wood, especially as the new millennium rolled around, but somehow Earth persisted. Occasionally she’d head farther outside London when she spotted one coming up, but mainly she’d decided to not avoid what others couldn’t. If that meant standing packed in with other people in hot Tube train as it whisked its way into the heart of the city, or finding ways to write to MPs about ways they could create better laws, or setting out the recycling bins the night before they were emptied, then that’s what it meant. If that meant avoiding or fighting Daleks or Cybermen or others who seemed set on making London a crater, then that’s what it meant, too. Thankfully, the latter happened rarely, and her neighbors usually forgot about anything odd that happened. Which was odd on its own, but no matter.

For bad or for good (but mostly good), Earth was her home now. The thin plastic card the Doctor had given her had been a bank card, and in the account was definitely more than Benison needed (one of the UNIT people, a kindly-eyed man with a bemused look, had laughed when he’d examined the card and said ‘The old boy never understood money, did he’). UNIT had helped her set up her own account in her own name, and transferred more than enough funds into it. (In the future that was Beni’s past, the whole village had never had that much money, as they hadn’t really needed it unless they’d gone to the capital. But by the time she’d been old enough to want to visit, the Daleks had started their visits and she’d never gone. So regular use of money had taken some…adjusting to.) She had a small dwelling, with an attached studio, and a little plot of land to garden, and a creature called a cat. She had friends and neighbors and a whole world to explore.

She had thought that she might perhaps lose the ability to see the branches of time, but the ability had not faded with time. Whenever she paid any idle attention to the threads, she could sense that Gallifrey was indeed frozen, quivering at the far end of their planet’s thread, their question echoing out along the strands. She ignored them. Bunch of whiners, were they not? At least they were alive. She suspected that that had to do with the Doctor, and she didn’t begrudge it. Nobody deserved to be exterminated by the Daleks, even the whole lot of officious xenophobes that the Gallifreyans were.

Even with access to more money than she’d ever imagined, Benison had loved the idea of working. Sarah Jane had helped her establish her own pottery studio and shop, which she’d called Guin’s Gifts, as a tribute to her people, whose ancestors didn’t even know they would exist, and to her parents, who had given her everything they could in a difficult place. Along a different branch, she watched them grow old, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren around them, but not along this branch. Not when it mattered, anyway, at least to Beni.

She had done well enough that she kept a little stall in Camden Market and employed a shopkeeper there, though she traveled there every other day to see to the shop and to see the people, a steady stream of tourists and some regular locals kept her business flourishing, and she almost never paid attention to their threads. After all, the Doctor’s advice had been to avoid plot developments, and also most people would probably think it rude to spy on the lives of strangers.

But, sometimes, strangers sought her out, whether she solicited it or not.

Once, a young woman with old eyes visited her shop and practically interrogated Beni about her life. “I’ve had my eye on you,” the woman said. Which, of course, wasn’t the least bit creepy. “You almost weren’t on my radar. But here you are, another of his cast-offs.”

“Who are you talking about?” Beni had responded. The thread of the woman’s life was straight, stretched far back into the past and far into the future and seemingly never ended. Who was this? This was no Gallifreyan cut loose from their planet, but a human. What had happened to her?

“The Doctor, of course. He drops out of the sky and tears the world down and forgets to put it back together again,” the woman said, her tone bitter. She absently picked up one of the mugs on sale. The crystal glaze looked like the night sky, with stars spattered across a dark background. “Who leaves you behind even when you ask to travel the stars.”

“That’s not the Doctor I knew,” Beni said. “I wasn’t _cast off_ or _left behind_ , either. I wanted a normal life. That’s what he offered me.”

“Aye, but I wonder which Doctor you did know.”

“I think I’d recognize any of the Doctor if they walked into my shop. They’re a good person.”

“Some decades, I wonder about that,” she said. That day, she purchased Beni’s entire stock of crystal-glazed mugs. What she planned to do with them, Beni didn’t know. Occasionally a special order would come in across the Internet (which had finally been invented, thanks be) for the same mug—Beni kept the glaze specially stocked.

Another time, she’d been visited by an aesthetically pleasing man in a long blue pea coat. “Benison Zuflucht, I presume?” he’d asked, a teasing grin on his face, his tone a doctorate in flirtation. “Jack Harkness.”

“Is that how you normally meet people?” Beni asked. “Because if I were someone other than myself, it would have worked, I think. I’d be open to being _friends_ , however.”

Jack nodded, clearly not the least bit deflated from being partially turned down. “Friends is an _excellent_ option,” he said. “Do I detect the pleasing tones of a Guinny?”

In surprise, and, if she were honest, a bit of delight, Beni smiled. “Most people think I’m an ex-pat American. How do you know where I’m from?”

The grin grew. “Oh, I was arrested in their main city once or twice, had a few escapades there. I’d remember if I’d met you there, though.”

“I never went to the capital, so there’s no chance you’d have met me there,” Beni said. “Too many Daleks around when I was growing up.”

“Too bad,” he said. “I think we would have had great fun.”

She studied him for a moment. His thread began in the 5000s, as hers did, and followed a linear path for some time before it crisscrossed itself in tiny hops through time and then began…stopping? And re-starting? Again and again, the man’s thread sputtered out and re-emerged. Beni had never seen anything like it before. “I think we would have, too,” she said. “Though I’ve not done nearly as much traveling as you.”

“You can still see time, then,” he said.

“How did you know what I could see?”

“I’ve seen your file. Friend of mine hacked UNIT’s databases,” Jack answered. “They’re notoriously easy to hack. Another friend of mine once did it with a single password. ‘Course, he was given the password by the Doctor—"

“The Doctor?”

Suddenly she recognized him. He’d been one of the people she’d seen in the scenes of the Doctor’s future happiness, the one holding tools as the Doctor with close-cropped hair grinned at him. That was in the past, she saw. Which meant that the Doctor she’d met and traveled with was likely no more; even if the Doctor was the Doctor no matter the face, the version she knew was no longer the most recent.

“You’ve met him, of course. Traveled with him,” Jack prompted.

“With one version of him, anyway, once upon a time.”

“Don’t we all.” He selected a small ceramic box from the shelf and set it on the counter. The box was the same color of the TARDIS, Beni realized, that calm, comforting shade of blue that was deeper than the sea and yet brighter than the sky. “How much?”

“For you? No charge,” Beni said. “I can definitely absorb the cost of one blue box.”

His eyes narrowed, and the grin faded. “Why?”

“Because I think you want to ask a question rather than buy a ceramic box.”

“Can you see if I meet the Doctor again?” Jack blurted. “He owes me some answers.”

“I’m not psychic,” Beni said, the memory of Daleks calling her ‘the seer’ rising like sap to the top of her mind. “Anything I see is a _possibility_ , not something definite.”

“Free will, time’s malleable, and all that. I know this, and yet I came all the way from Cardiff to ask you,” he said. “Is meeting the Doctor again a possibility for me?”

She nodded. “Yes. Depends on your choices, of course, and on the Doctor’s, but there’s at least one way it could happen.”

“Would it help you to know that I have his hand? He lost it around Christmas time and I got a hold of it.”

“His hand? That sounds…”

“Macabre, I know. But that’s kind of where I live right now.”

Honestly, there were no words for that, but Beni tried anyway. “It might? Look, if it happens, it happens. I traveled with the Doctor for what probably amounts to one trip. He brought me to Earth so I could have a normal life, and that’s what I’ve done. I’ve not seen him since. I don’t know if that’s because he’s forgotten me, or because he’s respecting the reason I came here, or because he’s avoiding me due to the circumstances we met in.”

“The War.”

It was clear from his tone that he spoke of the Time War. Beni nodded. “Yes, the War. He didn’t think it would end well, that he’d have to end it.”

“Well, he did. End it, I mean. Gallifrey gone, wiped out of existence. The Daleks—” he momentarily shuddered, but continued, “keep making a comeback, but no one knows why. It’s unfair for him to be alone if they get to be in the universe.”

“He’s less alone than he thinks he is, I think,” Beni said. She wouldn’t mention Gallifrey at the end of time; that was knowledge she’d only give to the Doctor, if appropriate. “And so are you. You’ve mentioned at least two friends?”

Jack’s roguish smile re-appeared, as if the sun had emerged from behind a cloud. “One could never be alone with someone like you, Benison.”

“Still doesn’t work on me,” she said, opening the register and pulling out a business card. She handed it to him. “But, yes, visit the studio as you like. Just give me a ring before you do. As friends do.”

He tucked the card and the box into a pocket. “As friends do,” he echoed. “I would like that, you know.”

“The others can come, too, if they like, including the hackers.”

“Well, one of them’s in a parallel universe, but other than that, I’ll let them know.” With another big grin and a wink, he whirled away into the tourist traffic.

Maybe she had avoided a heap of trouble by wanting a normal life, she mused. It certainly seemed that way.


	19. Counterpoint

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here's the last chapter. Beni meets the Doctor twice more. You'll see.

Then, one day, the Doctor appeared at the entrance of her market stall in Camden. He didn’t appear to recognize her, but she wouldn’t have mistaken him for anyone else. The face she’d known was immediately to the left of the one he wore now; this leather-jacket-wearing Doctor was Jack’s friend, but perhaps not yet. The lines of the Doctor’s life were tangled thickly, and she hadn’t the lifetimes it would take to untangle them.

With the Doctor was a young blonde woman. The woman browsed the shop, picking up items and studying them and setting them down again. “Hi,” she said to Beni, “do you have containers for tea? I remembered while we were eating’ chips; my mum’s wantin’ something like that for her birthday, and I forgot—"

“No worries,” Beni said. She pointed to the shelf where such items resided. “Over there.”

The woman smiled, said “Thanks”, and headed toward the shelf. The Doctor lingered near the counter, his wary eyes sweeping over the passing tourists as if looking for danger. That was a feeling Beni understood well—she’d never completely lost her heightened sense of danger, either, not after having grown up seeing danger coming and hiding in tunnels, hoping to convince everyone she loved that they’d pass by this time, too. She’d improved at ignoring the threads of busy passersby, but every so often she’d still startle at something or someone she saw. A habitual instinct—and that’s what the Doctor was doing, keeping a lookout for threats. When he wasn’t watching for danger, however, he was watching the young woman, his gaze softer than when on the tourists. There was a story there, Beni could see. Or, at least, the potential for a story.

“Can I help you?” Beni asked him.

“Nah, we’re just browsing. For her mum,” came the answer. Northern accent.

She leaned on her counter. “Ah, well, do let me know if I can help.”

“Are all of these handmade?” he asked, gesturing around to the shelves in the tiny shop.

“Yes, I make them at my studio,” Beni answered. “This is just a smaller shop, caters to tourists, mostly. You from out of town?”

He smiled. “You could say that.”

“Well, then, maybe something will take your fancy,” she said. “You could always take something home as a souvenir.” Beni crossed the shop to the shelf where the mugs were and plucked one from its spot. “This one has a glaze that detects the difference between hot and cold liquids and changes colors. Devised it myself.”

“How much?” he said, his eyes straying back to the young woman, who seemed to be making a choice between two containers.

Beni found herself wanting to be recognized, for him to see the life she’d built here on Earth, but she wasn’t necessarily sure he _wanted_ to recognize her. Maybe all she was, was a reminder of a painful part of his life. She told him the price.

“Fantastic,” he answered. He reached into one of his pockets and pulled out the necessary coins and bills.

“I can box it up for you, if you’d like.”

“Sure,” he said, handing the mug back to her.

Benison slid her business card into the cup before wrapping it in paper and boxing it. The woman chose a container that Beni had stenciled and glazed flowers—mainly roses and hydrangea, love and heartfelt emotions—onto. “Mum’ll love it,” she happily told the Doctor.

The Doctor seemed unsure of how to respond. “Yep,” he said.

The woman paid and the pair exited the shop.

 _If it happens, it happens?_ _You hypocrite_ , Beni thought. _You want him to see you. Why? For what purpose?_

~~~

Several months later, she was scraping out the sink where she did her mold pouring when she heard the bell over the door in the shop jingle.

“I’ll be with you in a moment,” she called, extricating herself from the sink and setting the grates back down. This was a task she could return to. Beni dusted her hands off on her apron. She was streaked with clay—her hands and forearms certainly, but she was fairly positive she’d swiped at an errant lock of hair while working and had probably gotten clay in her hair. Oh, well, perhaps it would emphasize the handmade aspect of her work to the guest.

She entered the front of the studio and stopped in surprise. There stood the Doctor. Again he had a different face; this one had fearsome eyebrows and an impressive crown of gray hair, and he wore a velvet jacket over a hoodie over a t-shirt. Was he perpetually _cold_? Or were the layers comforting, as her blankets were on chilly spring mornings when she slept in, making her feel a little less alone?

He looked apologetic. “I remember now,” he said. Ah, he was Scottish now. Interesting. “I’m a teacher in Bristol now, and I found that cup I bought so many years ago and found your card and I remembered.”

“What?” He’d only bought that mug a few months before. _Oh, right, time traveler._

“You don’t remember me, do you?” he replied, in a tone that implied he understood that feeling.

“I would never forget you, Doctor. I never forget a face.”

He smiled at that, a bittersweet smile. “I thought you might say something like that.”

“Why come tell me you found it?”

“I wasn’t very kind, all those years ago,” he answered. “I bought that mug because I felt guilty and I chucked it into a cabinet because I felt guilty and—“

“And you’re here in my shop because you feel guilty.”

“Yes, I suppose,” he said. “I should have said hello, all those years ago. I should have asked how you were, how you’d been getting along here. I apologize for not doing that. But I was trying to run from the person I was when I met you, afraid of who I’d been then. I’m not now. Took several hundred years give or take a billion but here I am now.”

“It was only several months for me,” Beni said. “Why come here at all?”

“I’ve made mistakes, Beni,” he said. “Getting you here to have a normal life is not one of them. And you are my friend, after all. And the cup is utterly fantastic—it does exactly what you said it does, change colors. Was it based on something your father taught you?”

She made a short nod. “Thank you, again.”

“I didn’t come to be thanked, though.” He stood there, tall, bent a bit from whatever weights he was carrying these days. He struck her as a sort of sentinel tree, guarding against those who’d charge into his territory uninvited. “I came to ask what’s next.”

“What’s next?”

Faces blurred around him, young and old, brunette and blond. Faces of others, too, a bald man and a college student with an Afro and a Mary Poppins cosplayer. “Hard to completely tell, with you,” she said. “But if I were to wager a guess, then I’d say, friendship. Adventure. Danger. But not…not anything most people would call normal.”

He waved a hand at her. “Oh, I’m contrapuntal,” he said, smiling broadly. “I have friends like you to harmonize with.”

“Any time,” she answered, not entirely sure what he meant but understanding the gist all the same.

“Now, I’m just over in Bristol, teaching,” he said. “I’m having a go at what passes for normal with me. Got students and marking and a butler and everything.”

“Professors have butlers?”

“Well, I’ve got a Nardole, same thing,” he said. “But if you’re ever in Bristol, you could pop over to my office and visit the TARDIS, I’m sure she’s bored. I’m sure Mum’ll nag over us taking this short trip to see you.”

 _Probably not the only one._ “I’ll keep that in mind, Doctor.”

He smiled again, as if the sun weren’t bright enough. “Good! Now I’ve got to get back in time for office hours, don’t want to keep the students waiting.”

“It’s a rare professor who doesn’t.”

She waved goodbye as he loped out of the studio. No, Beni hadn’t been destined for a normal life, but here, she had one. It wasn’t what she’d expected when she was small, and it wasn’t everything she’d ever dreamed, but it was a normal life. Besides, there was plenty of magic in everyday life—a single moment, a single choice (made by oneself or by another), a single kindness could change a life, whether that was her own or the Doctor’s or someone else’s. And anyone could wield that magic, one day, one moment at a time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is all of this. My first try at a long fic. I hope you enjoyed it!


End file.
